


Cross Section

by GravitasInSeriousExcess



Category: The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 14:02:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14916701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GravitasInSeriousExcess/pseuds/GravitasInSeriousExcess
Summary: The LCU Knock A Door Run is an Eccentric.  In the near future, it plans to leave the Culture forever.  For now, it simply wants to say farewell to some of its oldest friends. With it is Yaska Kalvene, as much an Eccentric as the ship on which she lives.  Forever tired of the way things are, she plans to join the ship on its new journey, and hopefully find something that finally catches her interest.Hrindre Tyu-Vrer hasn't yet learnt how to live again.  Within the virtual afterlife of the GSV I Liked It Better This Way Anyway, they work for the Peace Faction's Not Quite Contact department, engaging in diplomatic relations with The Talar, a Level 7 civilisation mentored by The Culture.  Yet, as with all things, one cannot simply forget the past.  Soon they'll have to come face to face with the trauma that put them on the GSV in the first place.M'Gale Yvrensk has committed terrible crimes.  Itlen-Orretaw, her slap drone, has committed even worse.  Taken in by the Hub of Lalyte Orbital, they still haven't truly made peace with their sins. But when the ship where she started her career comes knocking, M'Gale will be forced to come to terms with what she's done.





	1. The Talar

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-Hydrogen Sonata

GSV I Liked It Better This Way Anyway

 

-Will you at least talk to it?  
~I don’t want to go back, ship.  
-Why not?  
~I just don’t want to, alright?  
-Will you tell me eventually?  
~I don’t know.  No. Can we focus on the matter at hand?  
-What do you want me to tell it?  
~Tell it to go away.  
-Alright…

Tyu-Vrer materialised inside their office within the Peace Faction Virtual Embassy Environment.  It was, at the moment, a rather luxurious bedroom.

  
~You didn’t preconfigure it for the Talar envoy?

-You didn’t ask.  
  
Tyu-Vrer made the best approximation of an irritated stare that one could make over a direct neural connection.  The room flickered before them, becoming something more suitable for the envoy that was due to arrive in a couple minutes.  The bedroom was replaced with something more akin to a lounge, with long stretched bean bags spread out across the floor in a triangle shape, each bag with its long side presented to the others, so as to allow for the Talar’s naturally quadrupedal selves to sit in comfort.  Tyu-Vrer themself would lie down. Adorning the walls were large, unframed, high definition images of Culture Orbitals, each animated to show the Orbitals’ slow rotation. Outside the window was a direct view of a large GSV, along with its usual retinue of smaller GSVs, GCVs and GCUs catching a lift from the larger, faster vessel.  This was, in fact, a real-time view of the outside of the GSV I Liked It Better This Way Anyway, taken from one of its slaved modules, stationed near the outer edges of its inner field in order to give the effect of looking out a window onto the ship.

A bell ringed.

“Come on in,” Tyu-Vrer called out and immediately after, two Talar diplomats, dressed in largely casual attire by Talar standards - a thin but opaque layer of fabric loosely thrown over their body, animated with patterns corresponding to their emotional state - appeared sitting on the the two bags in front of them.  Tyu-Vrer themself sat down on the third bean bag, facing the two diplomats.

“Ah, Tyu, it’s good to see you again,” said the first, giving a large grin and staring them right in the eye.  Xyr name was “Eight-Seventeen” and xe were particularly fond of Tyu-Vrer, which was not necessarily something the human reciprocated, though they were of course with no ill feelings towards the young Talar.  Accompanying 8-17 was a slightly older diplomat, with whom Tyu-Vrer had had quite a lot of interactions with over the ten years or so of service that they had working with the Talar. The older diplomat was called 1-156 and was somewhere around the age of a thousand, though xe seemed not to remember.  For sure, xe’d seen the Talar through a long range of transitions and interactions,  _ especially _ with the Culture. Tyu nodded to the two diplomats and waved their hand, indicating to the Ship to bring them drinks.  A drone appeared between them, a metal tray suspended above it by a field.

“What would you care for?” Tyu-Vrer asked their two guests.  
“A red Oln, please, drone” replied 8-17.  1-156 merely shook xyr head.  
Two glasses appeared on the tray, one clear and another red.  They took their drinks and settled down on the bags again.  
“So, how can the Culture help you today.”

“We would like to ask the help of a Culture ship in our current project constructing hyperspace shielding around the black hole 88IP-7KL, for the eventual end of constructing a protected, superdense data centre,” 1-156 began.  “The Ship would likely be needed to perform survey work, verify plans and safeguard the construction process.”  
Tyu-Vrer mulled it over for a second.

~It seems a reasonable enough request.  
-Lot of work for the ship involved, though.  
~Not completely infeasible.  
-Could set up some sort of working group for it.  Series of volunteers, each spend a couple months on the project?  
~Can you just, quickly ask some other Ships.  See what answers you get.  
-I have a couple volunteers.  GSV Eclectic Collection of Ex-Museum Exhibits and a couple of its child ships.  Apparently it has a Talar researcher on board? Interesting.

“There’s several ships interested in helping with the project.  It’s unlikely a single ship can stay on the project for too long a time though.”  
“Several would work,” 8-17 replied. “Any help is welcome  In fact, a diversity of Culture contact would be greatly appreciated.”  
Tyu-Vrer sighed over their neural link.  
“We’ll put you in contact with the volunteers as soon as the meeting is over.  For the moment, though, I’d like to discuss a few more of the specifics of the project.”

The two Talar outlined the plan over the next hour, going over the general structural model, energy source and, to their especial excitement, the computational capacities of the system.  They were planning on using the black hole as a large heatsink and hoped to even possibly double their population size with this one data centre alone, along with several dedicated research cores, at least one of which would be dedicated entirely to studying the black hole.  They seemed to think there might be some benefit to probing inside it via hyperspace, even though it was widely regarded as a futile endeavour by most Level 8s. Tyu-Vrer and the Ship were happy to leave this pretense to them. Perhaps they would come across something everyone else had failed to see.

When the two Talar eventually left, after several more drinks, Tyu-Vrer had the Ship convert the space back into their bedroom environment.  They flopped down on the bed and sighed.

~They really are exhausting sometimes.

-They have lively role models.  Speaking of which-  
~Why does it want me back?  
-You know what Caldera-classes are like with their crews.  It misses you.  
~Does it not realise I’d rather just be happy without it.  
-That’s not very fair to it, now is it.  I think it feels a little guilty as well, given what happened and all.  
~It’s not its fault.  Have you told it that?  
-I don’t think it needs me telling.  
~Either way.  Just. Tell it to leave me alone for a little bit longer.  Maybe I’ll be more amiable in a bit.  
-If you say so.

 


	2. The River in Which I Nearly Drowned

Lalyte Orbital 

Spray.

The river flowed over the rapids below, foaming at the edges, the noise deafening.

“What would you do if I jumped, Hub?” asked M’Gale Yvrensk.  She sat cross-legged on a stone hanging just over the edge of the rapids.  “Would you let me fall?”  
“It hasn’t got any field generators.” Itlen-Orretaw interjected.  M’Gale could barely hear it, hovering somewhere behind her.  
An insect buzzed beside her.  
“Don’t underestimate me, Orretaw.“  
The drone made a choking noise.  
“Would be funnier to let you fall, though.”  
“I’d die.”  
“No you wouldn’t.”  
“It would hurt.”  
“Not for long.”  
M’Gale stood up and stepped over the edge.

 *

 She lay down on the grass, feeling the dirt between her fingers.  Her hair was still wet.  
“When I was growing up,” she began, “there was a river that ran past our house.  It was quite wide, but it was spanned by a series of stepping stones, and I would spend _hours_ jumping from one to the next, crossing the river and then coming back again.  Until I could run across them with ease.  
“Then one day, I ran across them without realising they were wet.  I didn’t see the moss covering them. And I slipt and I fell. And I got stuck there, without a terminal, my arm trapped beneath a rock, caught in the current of this river.  And I nearly died.”  
She lingered on that last word and then closed her eyes.  She heard Itlen-Orretaw tearing apart a fish nearby.

 “Planning on cooking for us, Orretaw?” the Hub teased.  
“This isn’t for eating.”  
“What’s it for then, your collection?”  
“Yes.”

Silence.  
  
“Where are you from, Orretaw?” M’Gale asked  
“The GCV No You Stop Copying Me.”  
“What was it like?”  
“Loud.  SC GCVs always are.  Always people running round.  Always somewhere to go, always somewhere to be.  Non-stop.”  
“Must be weird being somewhere like this then.”  
“On my first assignment, I spent some time on the GCU’); DROP TABLE words;~~.  That was loud too. But what set it apart was its garden. It was open to the void, no bulkhead, just a layer of fields keeping in an atmosphere.  I cultivated flowers there. During a rather tense encounter, the ship was forced the lower the fields keeping in the atmosphere, to try and get its volume down.  All my flowers died. All the fish I’d cared for died. Everything died. All my work died.”

“I prefer it here.  It’s peaceful here. Nothing dies except when it wants to.”

Silence again.  
   
“It’s a nice Orbital.”  
“Thank you, M’Gale,” the Hub murmured.  “Perhaps you’d like to see more of it sometime.”  
“No thank you.”  
The Hub sighted, affronted.  
“Maybe.. eventually.”  
“I look forward to it.”

“We should probably be getting back,” suggested Itlen-Orretaw.  
“We probably should,” M’Gale concurred.  She stood up and picked up her damp bag from the grass, slinging it over her back in one smooth motion.  She started walking towards to forest path which lead to her small shack.

The forest was called the Ulaika Wood and was one small section of a vast, multiple-plate spanning coniferous expanse which was one of the Hub’s pet projects.  The Wood was mostly huge, ancient species, some even transported from even older planetside forests and planted there. Each tree rose to over 200 metres and its base was wider than a house.  The Wood had a certain majesty to it. It was relaxing. Of all the places to spend her autumn years, M’Gale felt there couldn’t have been anywhere better.

It started raining.

“Hub, why?”  
“You deserve a present”  
“Ugh.”

The rain fell hard, creating a sort of discordant harmony amongst the trees as their leaves rattled with the drops.  Small streams formed on the dirt banks of the path, filtering into gutters dug along the sides, filled with floating leaves and small insects nipping around over the surface.  Large drops punctuated the constant patter on M’Gale’s head, keeping her hair from drying. She heard Itlen-Orretaw muttering to itself behind her.

The walk took an hour and a half and by the end all of M’Gale’s clothes were soaking and she herself was soaked to the bone.  She trudged up to her old shack, tucked in a small clearing deep within the Wood. It was made from the same wood as the trees behind it and was the result of years of work on her part during the earliest parts of her stay, with some help from the Hub and her slap-drone at the time. Only a single floor, it had a sloped roof that extended out some way past the front where she had built a small porch on which to relax. Small pillars rose up from the ground to support it, cut straight from a trunk.  She was proud of it. At least something had come of her.

The door slid open as she approached and a deep warmth emanated out from the heater the Hub had turned on earlier in the walk for her.  She stepped in and wiped her boots on the mat then waited as Itlen-Orretaw mades its painfully slow way up the path and entered after her.  She closed the door with a small panel to the side and then removed her wet clothes before collapsing on a long, heated sofa. She waved in the general direction of the hearth and a fire appeared, fierce and warming.  Itlen-Orretaw hovered in the corner, sorting its new find into its collection. This was more than she deserved, M’Gale thought, closing her eyes. Far more than she deserved.


End file.
